Finances (Careers pt.2) + Spring Exhibition📈

Welcome to the second and last post of my PGP/Careers class. Since this is pt.2 to my first Careers post, I’ll talk about how we can support ourselves by making budgets and savings. Since we presented what we learned from PGP in the PLP exhibition I’ll also talk about how our exhibition went.

After leaving off at “performing an Interview” we started learning about the harsh Gig Economy. We learned what it was and what came along with it, specifically UBER. We spent time reading several articles that talked about who, what, where, when, and why were involved in the Gig Economy.

The most interesting part about learning about the Gig Economy was running an Uber Driver Simulator. This simulation presented what an Uber driver would have to face and deal with on an average day. I ran the simulation twice because I learned from my mistakes from the first round. Both times I did manage to reach the income goal but ran into a few roadblocks. Overall, I decided that the Gig Economy or specifically Uber driving is not a reliable source of income as a full time job, however it would be beneficial as a part time or side hustle even.

Following up on budgeting for our future, we learned what types of payments our families or ourselves were paying. We categorized each expense as either FIXED or VARIABLE. Fixed payments are payments that are guaranteed to repeat at the same time every time. Variable payments are payments that aren’t pre-controlled like groceries, random Amazon purchases, buying clothes, etc. What I noticed is that I can afford to spend more money/month because I personally don’t really have any fixed payments so most of my expenses are smaller variable payments. I thought that this assignment was really great because its a simple way to keep track of payments, especially if I need to start saving for tuition.

After learning about our spending, we then learned about our income. We looked at the different types of our income like Gross and Net and how the government comes around and taxes percentages of our pay-checks. I thought it was worthy of covering this topic but I had already learned all about this in math earlier in the year so it was basically a refresher.

From there we began to learn about Financial Literacy. Financial literacy is the possession of the set of skills and knowledge that allows an individual to make informed and effective decisions with all of their financial resources. There are 5 components that one most be able to obtain to be Financially Literate and they are; Budgeting, Saving, Spending, Borrowing, and Investing. They all serve a purpose in order to make the right choices and be Financially Literate in general. We watched a TED talk about financial literacy and how we can use it properly in our lives to create financial stability over time.

Our teacher Mr. Harris was also asking us for ideas of financially-relevant movies to watch until we settled on watching MoneyBall. I surprisingly hadn’t watched the movie even though I’ve been playing baseball for close to 10 years so I was happy to hear that we were going to watch it as school work. I still don’t know why I hadn’t watched this movie sooner because it’s really, really good. May even consider it a favourite…….

At around mid-May, we started learning about the Stock Market. We quickly started researching about what it was, how it started, and how it worked. The highlight of this “project” in my opinion was the Stock Market Simulator that we were presented with. For a while now, I’ve wanted to learn about stocks and eventually actually begin investing so I decided to get the most out of this simulator. Mr. Harris also set a prize of a $20 gift card for whoever finished with the most money by mid-June which created competition instantly. We began by researching some of the terms used in the Stock Market like Bonds, Funds, Investment Trusts, etc. along with research on some stocks that we were going to invest in.

I personally didn’t have a clue what I should be investing my fake money into so I turned to researching what short term stocks I should invest in. I remember buying about 5 different companies’ stocks but I think eventually they all disappeared but you can check out my weekly reflections HERE. I started out pretty slow and wasn’t making much of a profit until my stocks suddenly jumped as predicted 😏. I then wasn’t sure when I should sell because they were at a high but I didn’t know for how long.

Long story short is that I held on to them and they eventually tanked which kinda made me wanna give up. Instead of doing that, I found a website called TradingView which could predict how stocks were going to perform. This website also gave suggestions on stocks to buy and sell in order to make the most profit. At first I was sceptical because how is a website with charts supposed to know but then it began telling me to sell some of my stocks, which I confidently ignored.

In result to that, the stocks I was recommended to sell dropped in price and I began losing money so I tested it out by buying one of the stocks it told me to buy and that stock made me money. The algorithm worked. For the rest of the challenge I sold and bought different stocks but at the end of the day, the stocks I had were never going to really get me anywhere. This hows how patient you need to be in the stock market because of how long out can take to make the profit you want. Looking back at it, I should have invested in higher quality stocks that would bring in more money AND THEN use TradingView to sell and buy.

Overall I thought that this Stock simulator was great and I plan to start fresh and try it again.

Spring Exhibition🌺

Since it was June again, the Spring Exhibition was bound to happen again. What PLP 10 had prepared to present was a mix between our work in PGP/Careers and our podcast series from our Maker class. We created business cards for our podcasts with a short description and QR codes for people to scan and reach each of our podcasts. I thought that this was really creative because it incorporated two separate classes into one theme which ended up working really great.

The theme our class was gonna go for was an office workplace. Just thinking about it sounds pretty boring, I agree, but we managed to turn our classroom into some sort of office. We decided to make “cubicle” offices with signs hanging from the ceiling for each different theme of our podcasts so that guests would find it easy to identify each theme.

Everyone sat in their designated area and set themselves up to be able to present their podcasts on Spotify along with our Podcast business cards on the side.

I thought that the exhibition went really well. Guests came up to each table as we presented what our work was and how we worked to create it. I met several guests who shared the same interests as me and had a multiple people scan my QR code to reach my podcast. The guest who seemed the most interested was actually Noah’s brother, who I ended up giving on of my cards to.

Overall I thought that the exhibition moved really smoothly and was executed to its max program-wide. Like I said, the Maker-PGP mixed presentation for the exhibition was really creative and the way we portrayed our theme was organized nicely.

Always nice to conclude another Exhibition, see you next time 👋